One of the aspects of the coronavirus and its resulting disease, COVID-19, that astonishes me is the inhumanity of it all. I don’t mean just the unbearable poignance of people dying alone of this and other diseases because of quarantines and travel restrictions., which my friend Anne, a former nurse, finds particularly sad. and which I find especially terrifying. I mean the way people are treating one another.
People no longer make eye contact or smile in acknowledgement when you’re out for a walk. Ask a question about the former olive bar at a supermarket — removed for sanitary reasons — and you’re barked at as if you’re a leper. Worst of all are the vicious, vile lies on the internet. As a New Yorker, I’m protective of New York, especially since 9/11. Then people had sympathy for New York in its trial. Now people act as if New York invented the coronavirus and is deliberately spreading it as it hogs all the ventilators.
What bunk. First of all, people are hunkered down, barely going out except to exercise and purchase groceries and only then because deliveries are understandably backed up. A friend who lives in Manhattan is staying in for a month. A person in her building took ill. The police and fire department came in hazmat suits to remove the individual. Then the building was scoured. There are health-care workers toiling to exhaustion, refrigerated trucks lined up to hold the dead, convention centers converted to hospitals, hospital tents in Central Park — the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens is going to become a hospital — and more testing here than virtually anywhere in the country. Does this sound like a place that isn’t taking social distancing seriously or is sending people gallivanting around the country?
But some New Yorkers escaped to Florida and other states where they probably have second homes, so let’s stitch a big scarlet C on them for supposedly spreading the virus. Funny: Florida liked selling these people homes. Now it doesn’t want them. I agree people shouldn’t be moving about. But why didn’t Florida say “no” to the spring breakers and their cash? They didn’t all come from New York.
My cousin Michele has a theory about why people are dumping on New York and they didn’t on 9/11. Then, she says, people around the country pitied us. And they could be generous in that pity, because it wasn’t happening to them. Now, however, New York is the canary in the coal mine, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo says. It is what they will become. And they’re filled with fear and its twin, anger.
It’s a good theory. But there’s more to it than that. First, back on 9/11, the internet wasn’t the ubiquitous presence that it is today, spewing scurrilous lies. And, of course, we didn’t have a president who encouraged such divisiveness until Donald J. Trump. He’s so thin-skinned that he accuses the press of the nastiness he visits on them.
A recent exchange with Yamiche Alcindor, White House correspondent for the “PBS NewsHour,” in which he intimated that she lost her job with The New York Times, because she wasn’t any good, or very nice, was a new low in disgrace. Judy Woodroff, the “NewsHour’s” anchor and managing editor, reacted in barely controlled anger, telling Alcindor on camera that she was doing a wonderful job and that she and the “NewsHour” team were proud of her. (She reiterated that in last night’s interview with ABC White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, author of the new book “Front Row at the Trump Show,” in which she took up the president’s relationship with the media.)
The damage has been done. People see a president who gets away with being mean-spirited, and they figure it’s a license to act in a similar vein toward anyone who offers a sinecure of opposition.
Some of this is understandable. We’re like Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott — confined to our island towers, condemned by some unknown curse to live life vicariously, longing for love and to be part of the far, wide world yet knowing to leave might mean certain death. Lockdown has made invalids of us all, whether or not we’re actually sick. And that sickness can take the form of everything from rudeness to domestic violence.
And yet, this moment is something we are called on to endure for the greater good. I’ve said right from the beginning that this is not so much a medical or even a financial crisis but an existential one that would force us to confront who we are — as Americans and as citizens of the world.
Are we the heirs of Breeds Hill and Gettysburg, the Ardenne and Iwo Jima? Or are we the spoiled, decadent denizens of an empire at its end? It is not enough that we endure. We must do so with gracious professionalism. And we’re seeing that. Last night on NYC TV 25, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, whom I’ve always thought of as an ineffectual leader, spoke with purpose and gratitude about the 500 paramedics and 250 EMT vehicles that have come to the city from around the country, thanks to FEMA — a reminder of post-9/11 spirit. Various orders of nuns are making face masks for the Wartburg care facility in Mount Vernon and Bronxville, New York.
These are just two examples of grace under pressure — which is grace in action.
When this is all over, we will have to have a serious conversation about a disposable, lazy, vaping, celebrity, antiintellectual LOL culture in which this could happen. We have to start thinking about that conversation now. That’s for another post.
In the meantime, smile. Acknowledge others. Stop blaming them for something they also have no control over. Figure out how you can be part of the solution. Find meaning in suffering. Change the world: Reinvent yourself.